uring that time, was the composition of
his famous "Canterbury Tales."[526] Experience had ripened him; he had
read all there was to read, and seen all there was to see; he had
visited the principal countries where civilisation had developed: he had
observed his compatriots at work on their estates and in their
parliaments, in their palaces and in their shops. Merchants, sailors,
knights, pages, learned men of Oxford and suburban quacks, men of the
people and men of the Court, labourers, citizens, monks, priests, sages
and fools, heroes and knaves, had passed in crowds beneath his
scrutinising gaze; he had associated with them, divined them, and
understood them; he was prepared to describe them all.

On an April day, in the reign of Richard II., in the noisy suburb of
Southwark, the place for departures and arrivals, with streets bordered
with inns, encumbered with horses and carts, resounding with cries,
calls, and barks, one of those mixed troops, such as the hostelries of
that time often gathered together, seats itself at the common board, in
the hall of the "Tabard, faste by the Belle"[527]; the inns were all
close to each other. It was springtime, the season of fresh flowers, the
season of love, the season, too, of pilgrimages. Knights returned from
the wars go to render thanks to the saints for having let them behold
again their native land; invalids render thanks for their restoration to
health; others go to ask Heaven's grace. Does not every one need it?
Every one is there; all England.

There is a knight who has warred, all Europe over, against heathens and
Saracens. It was easy to meet them; they might be found in Prussia and
in Spain, and our "verray parfit gentil knight" had massacred enormous
numbers of them "at mortal batailles fiftene" for "our faith." Next to
him, a squire who had, like Chaucer, fought in France, with May in his
heart, a song upon his lips, amorous, elegant, charming, embroidered as
a meadow--"as it were a mede"--with white and red flowers; a stout
merchant, who looked so rich, was so well furred, and "fetisly" dressed
that

Ther wiste no wight that he was in dette;

a modest clerk, who had come from the young University of Oxford, poor,
patched, threadbare, with hollow cheeks, mounted on a lean horse, and
whose little all consisted in

Twenty bokes, clad in blak and reed;

an honest country franklin, with "sangwyn" visage and beard white "as is
the dayesye," a sort of fou